11. Kinsley
KINSLEY
The bedroom door clicks shut behind me and I make it three steps before my ankle screams and my composure shatters at the same time and I crumple sideways onto the bed. I move my face into the pillow and cry.
Not the pretty kind. Not the single-tear, chin-wobble, mascara-smudge cry that I perfected in the bathroom stalls at Whitfield & Associates during the eighteen months I spent grinding myself into a fine corporate powder.
This is the ugly kind. The kind that comes from somewhere below my ribs and exits through my whole body, shoulders heaving, nose running, mouth open against the flannel pillowcase in a wet, graceless mess that I'd be humiliated about if there were anyone here to see it, but there isn't, because the only person within thirty miles just told me I was a weather event he waited out.
I bring the wool blanket over my head. It doesn't help. The wool is his too.
My throat aches. I roll onto my back, staring up at the rough-hewn ceiling beams through the blur of tears.
Exhibit A, your Honor, the subject arrived at the defendant's residence in a state of total physical and emotional collapse.
Exhibit B, she was stripped naked by a stranger and wrapped in his blankets while unconscious, establishing an immediate and involuntary bond of dependency.
Exhibit C through Z, every subsequent interaction occurred under conditions of extreme duress, confined space, and zero alternative human contact.
The prosecution rests. It was textbook. It was Stockholm syndrome with better lighting.
Except.
Except the flour. The way his thumb moved across my cheekbone, slow and deliberate, like he was memorizing the topography of my face through his fingertip.
Nobody touches another person like that because of cabin fever.
Nobody's hand trembles against someone's skin because of proximity and boredom and limited options.
I saw his hand shake. I saw it. I wasn't imagining that.
And the boots. The careful way he'd packed them, layered with wool to keep the shape, the laces tied in tight surgical knots so they wouldn't tangle.
You don't pack someone's shoes like that if they're a temporary burden.
You don't treat someone's things with that kind of attention if you're counting down the hours until they disappear from your life.
But maybe you do. Maybe that's just how he is.
Maybe Jakob Billsberry treats everything in his care with that same meticulous intensity, from his rifle to his firewood to the stray woman who washed up on his porch, and I've been stupid enough to read tenderness into what is simply competence.
Maybe I'm the artisanal pastry box all over again, something that showed up uninvited and waterlogged, something he handled carefully because careful handling is in his nature, not because it mattered. Not because I mattered.
I press the heels of my hands into my eye sockets until I see sparks.
The crying has tapered into the hiccupping, post-storm phase, my breath catching in irregular little spasms that make my ribs sore and my throat raw.
I pull my hands away and blink at the ceiling and think about tomorrow morning.
Rescue crews on the ridge. Voices that aren't his.
A truck or a helicopter or whatever they send up here for stranded city girls who drove thirty miles past their overpriced glamping retreat and ended up in the wrong man's bed.
I'll smile at them. I'll be grateful and cooperative and I'll tell the story later to my friends back home, and it will become a funny anecdote, the time Kinsley got lost in the mountains and shacked up with a literal mountain man, can you believe it, and they'll laugh and I'll laugh and no one will know that when I packed myself into whoever's vehicle carries me down that ridge I left something behind that I can't name because naming it would make it real and he already told me it wasn't.
The fire crackles through the wall. I can hear him out there.
Not moving, not pacing, just existing in the room I walked out of, occupying the silence the way only he can, filling the space with the weight and gravity of his presence even when that presence is doing absolutely nothing.
I want to hate him for that. For being so large and so solid and so there that even a closed door and five inches of timber can't dilute the pull of him.
I curl onto my side, tucking my knees up, pulling the blanket tight around my shoulders. My ankle pulses with a low, steady ache that matches my heartbeat.
I close my eyes and I don't sleep.
The gray light comes in stages, reluctant and thin, seeping through the gaps in the boarded windows like the mountain itself is unwilling to commit to a new day.
I see it happen from his bed, where I've spent the past four hours peering up with gritty, swollen eyes, my body exhausted and my mind running laps around the same bruised circuit.
Sleep never came. The fire died down to embers sometime around three, and I listened to him feed it twice, the heavy scrape of the iron grate, the careful placement of logs, the brief bloom of heat that pushed through the bedroom wall and touched the small of my back like a phantom hand.
I sit up when the first bird calls. My ankle has stiffened overnight into something mean and hot, and I swing my legs to the floor with a hiss, testing the weight.
Bearable. Not comfortable, but bearable, and I've been bearing uncomfortable things for a week now so what's one more morning.
I look around the room in the pale half-light and take inventory of what's mine.
Not much.
My phone, dead and useless, sits on the rough plank nightstand where Jakob placed it that first night.
My pastel trench coat, stiff with dried mud, hangs from a nail on the back of the door.
One sock. I have one sock. The other was lost somewhere between my ruined sedan and this porch, sacrificed to the mountain along with my dignity, my luggage, my carefully curated glamping wardrobe, and whatever was left of the emotional scaffolding I'd built around myself in Chicago.
I pick up the phone and the sock and the trench coat, holding them against me, and the sum total of my worldly possessions in this place fits in the cradle of my two arms.
Then I see the boots.
He left them inside the bedroom door. I didn't hear him open it, didn't hear the knob turn or the hinges creak, which means he moved with that unnerving, deliberate silence that a man as big as him should not be capable of.
The boots are mine, the hiking pair I bought new for the glamping trip, the ones he scrubbed clean of mud and packed with wool to hold their shape.
They sit perfectly parallel, laces tucked inside, a pair of his thick wool socks folded neatly on top because he knows mine are gone.
He knows I have one sock. He's been paying attention to my socks.
My throat constricts so hard I have to tip my head back and breathe through it.
I pull on his socks. They come up past my calves, enormous and warm, and I slide my feet into the boots and lace them with fingers that won't stay steady.
The flannel I slept in, his flannel shirt, hangs to my mid-thigh, and I button it all the way up with the same shaking hands and I do not let myself bring the collar to my nose.
I gather my pathetic little collection. Phone.
Sock. Ruined coat. I open the bedroom door.
He's at the kitchen counter with his back to me, and the rigid line of his shoulders tells me he heard the door, heard my uneven footsteps, is tracking me through the cabin the way he tracks everything, with total awareness and zero acknowledgment.
The bandage on his forearm is fresh, bright white against the sun-dark skin, and he changed it himself because I wasn't there to do it and he would never have asked.
A tin mug of coffee sits at the table nearest the bedroom.
Still steaming. Placed there for me within the last two minutes, timed to my waking, because of course he knew exactly when I'd get up.
I don't touch the coffee. I can't. If I wrap my hands around that warm mug and drink something he made for me I will come apart at the seams and I've done enough coming apart in this home to last me the rest of my life.
Then I hear it.
Distant at first, a low mechanical buzz that doesn't belong to the forest, that cuts through the bird calls and the wind and the creek-water sound of runoff still draining from the ridge.
ATVs. More than one. The buzz sharpens and separates into individual engines, climbing the switchbacks, grinding through whatever the road crew managed to clear overnight, and the sound grows and grows until it's undeniable, until it fills the cabin like an alarm, like a countdown, like the universe announcing that my time in this suspended, impossible place has officially run out.
Jakob's hands go still. His back is a wall. He doesn't turn around.
I hug my muddy trench coat tighter against me and stare at the broad plane of his shoulders, at the dark hair curling past his collar, at the place where his neck meets the frayed edge of his thermal henley, a place I pressed my lips to just yesterday when the world was smaller and the only things that existed were his skin and mine and the heat between them.
The engines are getting louder. I can hear voices now too, muffled shouts relayed between drivers navigating the damaged road, and each sound pulls the walls of this cabin further apart, letting the outside world rush in to fill the space where something fragile and unnamed had been growing in the silence between us.
I set my jaw. I blink hard. I wait by the door with my dead phone and my one sock and my ruined coat and I don't say a word, because he taught me that silence can carry more weight than language, and right now mine is screaming.